A Vital Force: Women in American Homeopathy, By Anne Taylor Kirschmann

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This book review is reprinted with the permission of the National Center for Homeopathy
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A Vital Force: Women in American Homeopathy
by Anne Taylor Kirschmann
Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 2004
paperback, 230 pages, ISBN 0-8135-3320-1

Reviewed by Julian Winston

  Good books about the history of homeopathy are few and far between. Homeopaths are typically interested in therapeutics, not history. Of the several thousands of books written about homeopathy since its inception, only a handful are about history. Writing an original scholarly work about the history of homeopathy (or anything else) requires an extensive amount of time spent digging through old journals and papers and extracting tidbits here and there that can be stitched together into something with coherent meaning. In this new work, Ann Kirschmann has done an outstanding job of doing just that and shedding new light on an important part of our homeopathic history. Most of us are aware that women played an important role in the history of homeopathy, but because few of them were writers, we have rarely seen their names. It seems that, until recently, the men wrote and the women simply practiced.
  In 1989, Kristin Mitchel, through the Department of History at Yale University, wrote a thesis titled: "Her Preference was to Heal: Women's Choice of Homeopathic Medicine in the Nineteenth Century United States." It was a well-conceived, well-presented thesis, but it was never recognized outside of the small circle of homeopathic historians.
  In 1999, Anne Taylor Kirschmann submitted "A Vital Force: Women Physicians and Patients in American Homeopathy 1850-1930" for her doctoral thesis at the University of Rochester. It was a masterful work. Happily, it was recently published by Rutgers University Press, and is now available for all to read.
  In the early 1990s, when the National Center for Homeopathy was moving from Washington, DC, to Alexandria, Virginia, I came across a number of large boxes of files from the American Foundation for Homeopathy. The NCH was short on storage space, so I took them for safekeeping and stored them at my home in Philadelphia.
  Shortly afterwards, I was contacted by Ms. Kirschmann who was in the process of writing her thesis. On one of her visits to the Hahnemann University Archive in Philadelphia, she visited me, and I showed her the files. She spent an afternoon going through them and determined that they contained useful information. Since I was about to move to New Zealand, I gave her the files for safekeeping. Little did either of us suspect that within those boxes was the very information needed to bring the history of women in homeopathy into the 20th century. So, in some sense, I feel a bit responsible for this wonderful book.
  In A Vital Force, Anne Kirschmann traces the involvement of women in the homeopathic movement from the beginnings in the 1850s through the decline of homeopathy in the 1930s. The stories are fascinating: the struggle of the women to obtain education; the belief, on the part of the male- dominated profession, that women were too delicate and incapable of the kind of thought needed to become physicians; the refusal of male physicians to perform any gynecological exams (and often the refusal of woman to submit to such performed by men); and the role of the interested lay-practitioner.
  Against this background we find the usual sub-rosa issues facing homeopathy: the admission (or not) of "allopathic" therapeutic means, the use of potentized medicines or material doses, and the control of the local homeopathic societies by various factions.
  Chapter One, "The New School of Medicine," is a concise description of homeopathy and how it was placed within society in the mid-1800s. One cannot ask for a better introduction to the art.
  The book traces the rise of the female physicians (both homeopathic and not) and the changes in American medicine after the turn of the century that led to the demise of formal homeopathic education. It discusses the rise of the involvement of the lay community to protect homeopathy during the time when the homeopathic schools were folding.
  In some sense, however, this work is more than a dissertation about women in homeopathy; it is a view of the rise and fall of homeopathy as part of American medicine, and the social systems that helped and hindered both sexes in their quests.
  An interesting point brought up in the book is one not often discussed-that most patients didn't care if their doctor was a homeopath or not. It seems that, with the exception of those involved in homeopathic politics, the average person made no distinction aside from the fact that the homeopath's medicine tasted better. A physician was a physician, and was measured by the results they obtained. Their adherence to a specific therapeutic modality mattered little. As the author wrote to me, "It is only when we understand homeopaths as being fully within the main trends of medicine as a whole that we can get away from viewing them as eccen- tric sectarians. When we do situate them in this way, we can understand why (besides an interest in homeopathic therapeutics) so many respectable and respected men and women became homeopathic physicians. They were not choosing a medical sect but a medical profession."
  The internecine politics within the homeopathic movement, especially in the period of 1920-30 when the schools were closing and the American Foundation for Homeopathy was trying to keep homeopathy alive, makes a fascinating read, especially today when the licensed/unlicensed dichotomy within homeopathy seems in danger of creating an irreparable fracture.
  Anne Kirschmann has assembled a masterful work--easy to read and brimming with information which places homeopathy in the social context of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States. In some ways, it has extracted the best of all the other histories, and, with much added new material, presents the ideas in a fresh light. As such, it deserves a wide reading by all those who wish to understand not only where we came from but also to understand what we can do to keep history from repeating itself.